1a The Main Window

As you can see above, the main window consists of various
elements, the most dominant of which is the preview thumbnail. This
widget will depict a scaled version of your desktop, which can be
used for defining an area of recording.

recordMyDesktop can record either the whole screen or a
predefined area within it.

On gtk-recordMyDesktop, the
preview widget performs a full update every two seconds. On
qt-recordMyDesktop the update happens incrementally, on a rolling
horizontal fashion.

Beneath
the desktop preview, there are two buttons, “Select Window” and
“Record”. “Select Window” can be used to confine the area of
the recording on a single window (more information on the alternate
ways of defining the recording area, can be fount at section 2b).
The button name “Record” is self-explanatory and simply launches
a recording.

On the top-right corner, we can see two scale widgets,
labeled as “Video Quality” and “Sound Quality”. These
control the quality of the encoded file(bitrate) and not that of
capturing. More information on setting their values can be found
at section 2d.

A
very important element of the interface is the checkbox on the left
of the sound quality scale. When this box is checked, sound
recording is enabled. When it is empty,
there will be no audio recording and the resulting file will consist
only of a video stream.
Beneath the audio and video
quality settings, there is a large button named “Advanced”.
Clicking that will bring a new window, that will allow you to set a
vast number of options, and fine tune the behavior of the program.
The advanced window is examined at section 3.

Finally on the bottom-right
corner, there are the “Save As” and “Quit” buttons. Clicking
the “Save As” button will present you with a save-file dialog,
which will allow you to pick a destination and file-name for the
encoded file.
The “Quit” button exits the
program, without confirmation. During exit, all user-set options are
saved.